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‘I’m paid to punt!’

‘It’s worse in Philly! … had fucking water-drops in Seattle for three seaso—’

‘Please Lord, spare the Leg,’ Orin whispers each time just before touchdown.

‘… of how you could be an Oiler! You could be a Brown.’

The organopsychedelic muscimole, an isoxazole-alkaloid derived from Amanita muscaria, a.k.a. the fly agaric mushroom — by no means, Michael Pemulis emphasizes, to be confused with phalloides or verna or certain other kill-you-dead species of North America’s Amanita genus, as the little kids sit there Indian-style on the Viewing Room floor, glassy-eyed and trying not to yawn — goes by the structural moniker 5-aminomethyl-3-isoxazolol, requires about like maybe ten to twenty oral mg. per ingestion, making it two to three times as potent as psilocybin, and frequently results in the following alterations in consciousness (not reading or referring to notes in any way): a kind of semi-sleep-like trance with visions, elation, sensations of physical lightness and increased strength, heightened sensual perceptions, synesthesia, and favorable distortions in body-image. This is supposed to be a pre-dinner ‘Big Buddy’ powwow, where the littler kids receive general big-brotherly-type support and counsel from an upperclass-man. Pemulis sometimes treats his group’s powwows like a kind of colloquium, sharing personal findings and interests. The viewer’s on Read from the room’s laptop, and the screen’s got block-capitaled METHOXYLATED BASES FOR PHENYLKYLAMINE MANIPULATION on it, and underneath some stuff that might as well be Greek to the Little Buds. Two of the kids squeeze tennis balls; two rock and bob Hasidically to stay alert; one has a hat with a pair of fake antennae made of tight-coiled spring. More or less revered by the aboriginal tribes of what’s now southern Quebec and the Great Concavity, Pemulis tells them, the fly agaric ‘shroom was both loved and hated for its powerful but not always unless carefully titrated pleasant psycho-spiritual effects. A boy probes at his own navel with great interest. Another pretends to fall over.

Some of the more marginal players start in as early as maybe twelve, I’m sorry to say, particularly ‘drines before matches and then enkephaline^[26] after, which can generate a whole vicious circle of individual neurochemis-try; but I myself, having taken certain vows early on concerning fathers and differences, didn’t even get downwind of my first bit of Bob Hope^[27] until fifteen, more like nearly sixteen, when Bridget Boone, in whose room a lot of the 16 and Unders used to congregate before lights-out, invited me to consider a couple of late-night bongs, as a kind of psychodysleptic Sominex, to help me sleep, perhaps, finally, all the way through a really unpleasant dream that had been recurring nightly and waking me up in medias for weeks and was beginning to grind me down and to cause some slight deterioration in performance and rank. Low-grade synthetic Bob or not, the bongs worked like a charm.